True/False Film Festival announces its 2018 films.

COLUMBIA - The True/False Film Festival announced on Wednesday the feature films showing at its 2018 festival.

The selection committee picked the 40 films out of roughly 1,300 submissions from around the world.

Six films will be making their festival debut at the festival including, "América," "Black Mother," "Combat Obscura," "Lovers of the Night," "Voices of the Sea" and "The Task."

Screening committee member Stacey Woelfel said América is one of the stand-out films that he has seen.

"It's a great story about family, love and where the important things in life are, so people will love that and it's beautiful in many ways." he said.

This year's festival will be its most internationally diverse lineup with four of the countries represented for the first time, according to its press release.

"The programmers don't try to do a theme [for the films], or anything like that." Woelfel said. "They look for the best documentaries they can find that match the taste that they believe has been developed around the festival."

Each submission is ranked by one of 25 screeners, who send the top-ranked films to four programmers. The programmers make the final selection of the 40 films, according to Woelfel, who is chairman of the Murray Center for Documentary Journalism.

"The programmers also know filmmakers they want to invite when there's a film and they see films at other festivals like Sundance," he said. "And so, not every film comes from the submission process, in fact, a lot come from invitations and others that they see."

The True/False Film Festival takes place March 1-4 in downtown Columbia.